The Holy of Holies (4)

 

O How He Loves Us!

 

“So that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me” (Jn. 17:23).

 

“So that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn. 17:26).

 

“Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love” (Jn. 15:9).

 

The overriding theme of the Upper Room is the love of God; God’s love for us, God’s love living in us, God’s love flowing from us to Him and to one another.

 

“We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16).

 

The Upper Room begins with love. “Jesus, knowing that His hour had come that He would depart out of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

 

The Upper Room concludes in love, “So that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them” (Jn. 17:26). We have an inclusio of love, and indeed, not only do we have a literary inclusio, but we see that our life in the Trinity is to be an inclusio of love, that our life with one another in the Trinity is to be an inclusio of love. Our biosphere is to be the essence of God, the love of God, the heart of God.

 

Our love for one another is to be our distinctive witness, the mark of the Christian, the mark of the Church – but it is not just any love, it is the very love of God, “That you should love one another even as I have loved you” (John 13:34 – 35).

 

Jesus reiterates this again when He says, “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:12 – 13).

 

Have we considered the possibility that the best training course on witnessing to the world is a course on loving one another? How can the world possibly see Jesus Christ without seeing His love living in His People? Arguments do not win hearts, love wins hearts. You may intellectually convince me of an argument, but unless my heart follows in love and commitment to Christ, I will not know eternal life. Arguments may draw me to a certain degree, but only love will keep me.

 

Love is the animating force in our life in the Trinity. “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to hm and make our abode with him” (John 14:23).

 

O dear friends, the Father loves us as He loves Jesus, Jesus loves us as the Father loves Him, we are to love one another as Jesus loves us, our love for one another (along with our unity in the Trinity, John 17:21 – 23) is our distinguishing mark, our identifying characteristic, our primary witness to the world.

 

As Paul writes, we can have all spiritual gifts and can engage in all kinds of service, but if we do not have love we have nothing (1 Cor. Chapter 13). Consider that this chapter lies between two chapters that explore our life in community, consider that it is prelude to the great chapter on the Resurrection; Chapter 13 is the animating and motivating life of the Holy Spirit, the love of God, within the Body of Christ (chapters 12 and 14), the Body which participates in the Resurrection, the Second Man, of Chapter 15.

 

No wonder Paul writes, “Beyond all these things put on love, which is the uniting bond of perfection” (Colossians 3:14).

 

To enter the Holy of Holies is to enter the depths of the love of God in Christ, to be plunged into the ineffable depths of the Divine shekinah, to be enveloped in the cloud of glory in which we behold Him and in which we realize that since He laid down His life for us, that “we ought to lay down our lives for one another” (1 John 3:16). When we “see” this, we truly “see” the love of God.

 

How are we to know the fulness of God?

 

“That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:17 – 19).

 

To know the love of Christ is to know the fulness of God, to know the fulness of God is to know the love of Christ.

 

But we cannot know the love of Christ without one another!

 

We “know we have passed from death to life because we love one another”!

 

Once again, “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:11 – 12).

 

And let us not forget, “The one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

 

We need one another so that we may love and be loved.

 

When we approach our Father, whether as individuals, as marriages, as families, or as congregations, it may be that our dear Father has a question, and that question is, “Where are your brothers and sisters? Have you come alone?”

 

As I write this, I am sure that some readers will be saying, “Yes, but…” Some readers will seek exceptions to loving others, some readers will want to maintain barriers with others, will want to find a doctrine, a practice, a teaching, to exempt them from loving others sacrificially, from laying down their lives for certain others.

 

Allow me please to simply point to our Savior, who leads us into the Holy of Holies by washing the feet of the Twelve, including Judas Iscariot. Our Savior, our Lord, instructs us, “If I then, the Lord and Teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14).

 

Our calling is to love and serve, we can trust Jesus to take care of what follows – even if what follows is betrayal and crucifixion…for most certainly there is also resurrection.

 

O if we only knew how much our Father loves us!

 

Your Father loves you just as He loves Jesus!

 

“Could we with ink the ocean fill,

  And were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

  And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

  Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

  Though stretched from sky to sky.”

 

By Frederick Martin Lehman

 

Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship Part II – Reflections (31)

 

 

In the final movement of his chapter on The Visible Church Community, Bonhoeffer reminds us that we are strangers in this world on our way to our heavenly Home. “The Christian community thus lives its own life in the midst of this world, continually bearing witness in all it is and does that the present form of this world is passing away (1 Cor. 7:31” (page 232).

 

“Here on earth, the church-community lives in a foreign land. It is a colony of strangers far away from home” (p. 232).

 

On page 233 Bonhoeffer writes that the church is to be “following only the voice of the one who has called it.” He says concerning the church, “They look only to their Lord. He is in heaven, and their life for which they are waiting is in him.”

 

From the middle of page 232 through the conclusion of the chapter on page 234, Bonhoeffer cites no less than twelve Bible verses that speak of our pilgrimage through the world to heaven, and to how our testimony of Jesus ought to appear.

 

“Christians are poor and suffering, hungry and thirsty, gentle, compassionate and peaceable, persecuted and scorned by the world. Yet it is for their sake alone that the world is still preserved. They shield the world from God’s judgment of wrath. They suffer so that the world can still live under God’s forbearance. They are strangers and sojourners on this earth (Heb. 11:13; 13:14; 1 Peter 1:1).”

 

Of course, the question is whether this describes us, the professing church in the United States, the professing church in the West.

 

Might we be like the Laodiceans in thinking, “‘I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing,’ and you do not know that you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked” (Rev. 3:17)?

 

Are we a cruciform people? When the world sees us, does it see a people marked by the Cross? Carrying the Cross? Suffering with Jesus for others?

 

Does the world see us at all? Do we matter? When the world does see us, does it see an appendage to a political party or a nationalistic agenda? Should the world notice us, does it see angry people, unmerciful people, people obsessed with worldviews and economic and political agendas, people aligning themselves with the economic, political, and religious forces of the antichrist and Babylon (Rev. chapters 13, 17, 18; 2 Thess. 2:1 – 12)? Are we living as the sheep or the goats of Matthew 25:31 – 46?

 

If Jesus is correct in teaching that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, then what can we say of ourselves? When we gather what do we talk about? If we are not speaking of Jesus to one another then we ought to tremble and call a fast and repent (Joel 1:14ff). If we are not serving “the least” of His people (see Matthew 25:31 – 46), then we ought to confess our sin and change our lives…serving the disenfranchised, the stranger in the land, the poor, the politically powerless, the hurting, the fearful, the hungry, the homeless, the sick.

 

When we stand before Jesus Christ, none of us will be wearing masks to conceal our identities – we will not be able to hide who we really are.

 

Following Jesus is not easy in the United States. We are bombarded with information, with hype and spin, with the peer pressure of agendas, with an Imperial Cult of nationalism, with various cults intent on wrecking our understanding of natural law, common grace, common sense, and human decency. We have been seduced by pleasure and comfort and affluence (or the illusion of these things). We worship at the altars of Wall Street, Hollywood, Nashville, Washington, D.C., Fox News, CNN, and other media outlets.[1] Our churches have imported idols into sacred spaces just as ancient Judah brought idols into the Holy Temple of God; political idols, national idols, economic idols, entertainment idols, idols of pleasure, religious idols.

 

It is not easy to follow Jesus in the United States, it is not easy for a congregation to keep focused on Jesus, the pressure to entertain, be attractive, to grow numerically, to grow financially, to measure ourselves by the standards of the world can be intense. It is difficult for pastors to be faithful when their churches are more attuned to the above idols than to God’s Word and Jesus Christ. How hard it is to serve people who have a consumer mentality, or who have a primarily economic and political mentality. We cannot serve more than one master (Matthew 6:24) – why do we think we can?

 

While we ought not minimize the obstacles to following Jesus as strangers and pilgrims, we should not fail to confess that if God is for us, who can be against us? (Rom. 8:31).

 

Let us not forget that greater is He who is in us, than he who is in the world (1 John 4:4). Nor that we have been given the Holy Spirit so that we might be Christ’s witnesses to the end of the age, and that He is always with us (Mt. 28:20; Acts 1:8).

 

Let us remind ourselves and one another that we are brothers and sisters in the communion of saints, joined to those who have gone before us and to one another across the globe this very day; we are not alone (Hebrews Chapter 11; 12:22 – 24).

 

Let us also realize the while all things around us may be shaking, that those things that cannot be shaken will remain; in fact, the great shaking that we see within and without the professing church is to reveal the Lord Jesus Christ and the City of God (Hebrews 11:25 – 29). We ought to soberly realize that “judgment begins with the house God” (1 Peter 4:17). In Revelation, the Holy City is fully manifested after great judgments and shakings, after God’s People have proven themselves faithful to the Lamb through incredible times and judgments and difficulties.

 

The book of the prophet Malachi portrays the people of God, the church after returning from Babylon, as failing to distinguish between the clean and unclean, as offering to God less than the best, as a covenant-breaking people toward God and in marriage, with an unfaithful priesthood.

 

The church was engaging in sorcery, in sexual promiscuity, they were liars, they did not pay employees a fair wage, nor did they care for the widow, the orphan, or the immigrant! They did not fear God. (Malachi 3:5). These people were not faithful stewards of the resources that God was giving them (Malachi 3:8 – 9).

 

There were even those who were saying, “It is vain to serve God; and what profit is it that we have kept His charge?” (Malachi 3:14). Doesn’t this remind us of our own approach to church life? We ask, “Where is the profit? Where is the return on investment? Where is the practical result of this action? What is it in for us?”

 

We ask these questions rather than ask, “How shall we follow Jesus? How shall we bear His Cross? How shall we deny ourselves and serve others?”

 

Yet we also read in Malachi:

 

“Then those who feared the LORD spoke to one another, and the LORD gave attention and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who fear the LORD and esteem His name. ‘They will be Mine,’ says the LORD of hosts, ‘on the day that I prepare My special treasure [jewels], and I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him’” (Malachi 3:16 – 17).

 

“But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall” (Malachi 4:2).

 

God has always had a remnant faithful to Him and committed to each other.

 

Bonhoeffer wrote (as quoted above): “Yet it is for their sake alone that the world is still preserved. They shield the world from God’s judgment of wrath. They suffer so that the world can still live under God’s forbearance. They are strangers and sojourners on this earth (Heb. 11:13; 13:14; 1 Peter 1:1).”

 

Isaiah wrote, “Unless the LORD of hosts had left us a very small remnant, we would be like Sodom, we would be like Gomorrah” (Isaiah 1:9).

 

Shall we live as a remnant, following the Lamb wherever He goes? Shall our Father prepare us as His special treasures, His jewels? Shall we live in the Light of the Sun of Righteousness?

 

“He who overcomes will inherit all things, and I will be his God and he will be My son” (Revelation 21:7).

 

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[1] Lest you misunderstand me, this is not to say there are not faithful people serving in these centers of power and influence, but it is to say that the ethos and underlying power in these centers is opposed to the Lamb (Psalm 2). The powers of this world are often depicted in the Bible as beasts, even as a combination of beasts, bestial Frankensteins if you will. They devour those who ride them, who serve them, and who are in proximity to them.